La Señal (The Sign) is a novel based on two realities. One is the greatest threat now hanging over our globalized world, so totally dependent on computers.
The other is a real scientific project at Princeton University, a project that is hard to credit but which may one day prove to be our only hope.
A gas explosion kills a woman and the child she is carrying. Only two people know that it was not an accident: her husband, Ian Moone, a computer genius who is working for the Armed Forces in a secret project, and the man who was trying to murder him.
This incident prompts the deployment of Janus, an undetectable military system enabling every computer network in the world to be remote-controlled.
The count-down starts. In just over twenty-four hours, the greatest threat hanging over our world, a world totally dependent on computers, will become a reality: the end of technology and civilization as we know it, taking us back to the darkness of the Middle Ages just as we move into the twenty-first century.
Ian Moone manages to make his escape, after killing the man who was trying to murder him. He is to disappear without trace, amid a devastating snowstorm that is sweeping in as if to announce an imminent disaster that no one can forestall.
Nobody, that is, except perhaps Lákesis, an unusual FBI group equipped with a particular cutting-edge technology based on the amazing scientific discoveries concerning the influence of mind on matter made at Princeton University.
Thanks to a string of random-number generators dotted all around the world, the Lákesis system can predict when and where something catastrophic is going to happen. But not what it will be. As had indeed happened, with two hours’ warning, in the case of the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
With practically nothing to go on, Lákesis’s best agent, Maia Kensington, a tough young ex drug-addict, sets out to hunt down a shadow, in a village cut off by the storm of the century, a village where unsuspected mysteries lie hidden.
There her path crosses and becomes bound up with Ian Moone’s. Their frantic race against the clock to find out the truth – just what it was that had prompted The Sign – leads them both towards a dramatic, inevitable ending.
A race against time and destiny.
